How to: Boost Your Leads By Implementing a Basic QA Widget into Your Site

Welcome to this week’s how-to, where we’ll be covering one of my personal-favorite tools for lead generation: the Question/Answer Widget, or “QA Widget” for short. The QA Widget is sort of the middle-ground between live chat and a basic “contact us” form. It provides the ease of using a contact form without your customers worrying they’ll never receive a reply, and combines that with the personal touch of live chat without requiring a big budget (from you) or a time commitment of unknown length (from the customer).

When a customer asks you a question, the likelihood of them buying from you is dramatically increased. With the QA Widget, your customers have a quick way to send you their inquiry.

Should You Use the QA Widget?

If you offer B2B services or you have an ecommerce model, then absolutely. Compared to a standard contact page, the QA Widget has ten times the success rate, and several major sites already use them (we’re integrated with Salesforce and HubSpot, for example).

An example QA Widget in use by a ventilation business.

The QA Widget brings with it seriously increased conversion rates, and its customization means that it isn’t limited in style or application to just one type of site. As seen in the example above, the QA Widget can have a chat-like design without requiring immediate response from you. After the customer enters their info and their question, the QA Widget displays a thank-you message (which is also fully customizable) and their query is sent to you for response at a time convenient to you.

Setting Up the QA Widget

Getting a QA Widget set up for your site is a quick and painless process!

Step 1: Creating a New Lightbox

The first thing you’ll do is log in to your Digioh account. From there, select the “New Lightbox” button.

Scroll down a bit until you find contact-type Lightboxes, and select the one you best like. For this tutorial I’ll use the sample legal assistance box.

Once you’ve chosen the Lightbox you want want to use, go ahead and select it and give it a name. Go to the main Lightbox page and select it.

Step 2: Setting the Conditions

Now that you’ve selected a Lightbox, you have a few options for how your QA Widget will function. I’ll cover two of them here: timed + on-click, and only on click.

Timed Method

Using the timed function is a rather aggressive approach which causes the QA Widget to pop up after a given period of time. Setting it up is a quick three-step process:

1. Go to the “Conditions” tab in the accordion-style tabs on the left, and select “Edit Conditions.”

2. Click on “Add Conditions” and then “Add New Rule.”

3. From the drop-down, select “Total Seconds on Page.”

And you are good to go. Adjust the number of seconds as necessary.

On-click Method

For some sites, an aggressive widget just won’t work. The on-click method causes the QA Widget to remain minimized until the visitor manually opens it. The process for setting it up is the same as for the timed method, plus two more steps:

1. Change the number in the drop-down to something extremely high, like 4000. At that rate, a user would have to stay on a given page for more than an hour before the QA Widget would open itself.

2. Go back to the main Lightbox editing page and select the “Teaser” tab on the left. Make sure the “follow me” option is turned on.

And you’re good!

All there is left to do is to customize it to your liking. You can change text, you can move things around or resize them, you can personalize the coloring, and you can do so much more! The possibilities are nearly endless.

Tips for Optimizing Your QA Widget

So you’ve got your QA Widget set up now, but just like anything else in this world, there’s a science to getting the most out of it. Here are some helpful tips for getting the best conversion rates possible:

Use a casual (but personal) image.

For many businesses, a selfie or other nonprofessional image can help your customers feel more connected to you.

Avoid using the word “chat.”

If a customer submits a question expecting to get an immediate answer only to find that they have to wait for a reply, they can feel cheated. Make it clear that you’ll get to them soon without letting them think a response will be instantaneous.

Avoid a generic “contact form” look.

We’ve all filled out a contact form in the past only to have our inquiry enter the black hole of no response. You will generate more leads if your customers are confident they will hear from you.

Don’t ask for too much personal information.

You may find it best to ask for things like a ZIP code or a phone number, but for some businesses this can be off-putting to customers.

Combine it with the Teaser Follow.

With the Teaser Follow, your customers will be able to find and use this form no matter where they are on your site. You can read more about that here.

Final Words

Like I said at the beginning, this is one of my favorite tools. It’s so versatile and it’s so effective at converting, and it’s so easy to set up and personalize! There are a lot of options and tweaks you can make to it, so if you find yourself overwhelmed (or maybe you just can’t make that final decision), the Digioh team is happy to help out and can be easily contacted.

That wraps things up for this week’s how-to. Have you had experience with the QA Widget? Tell about it in the comments below!